House Rules
General Rules Thaumaturgy as Regular Specialties Thaumaturgy is buyable at the XP cost of a regular specialty for an Exalt. This is because it is extremely weak compared to Exalted power, but should still be something one can do without being gimped, whether to represent training as a mortal or an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of Occult. Status: Proposed Half-Price Terrestrial Martial Arts for Celestials TMA charms should be buyable for half the regular price if the character is a Celestial Exalt. Same reason as the above house rule - it seems desirable to allow people to take sub-optimal choices in order to broaden the character, without being penalised heavily for it. Status: Proposed Backgrounds with XP Backgrounds could be buyable for a price of 3XP per dot. If we go with this, I'd suggest we also disallow purchasing magical backgrounds (allies, artifact, manse, mentor, cult) above three, while also allowing the purchase of social backgrounds for a price of 1XP per dot because they're so incredibly fluid in an Exalted campaign. That is to say, if we go with default Exalted setup of "if it happens, then you can keep it" then there's very little to stop your average social Exalt from picking up Resources 5, Backing 5, Followers 5, Influence 5 within two or three scenes of starting. Status: Proposed *Leith says: we don't need fancy rules or limits; we just need to observe that the ST has the final word, and you talk it over first. Crafts as Regular Specialties I'm not entirely sure about how this one would work, but I saw someone mention it on the White Wolf Wiki and thought I'd put it up here with the rest of the XP-savers. Basically I gather the idea is that you pick up Craft as an individual skill, and then buy specialties in Craft in order to allow you access to a particular type of Craft. If we're going with Backgrounds = 3XP, then this seems like an essential houserule to avoid making Crafts completely gimped. Status: Proposed *Leith: Our only confirmed Twlight has Craft: Wood (hur hur), and like no Exalt is going to take Craft: Water. The only reason Exalts can cook is they don't suffer unskilled penalties. Craft is an adjunct to most character concepts; to be a powerful crafter you only need one Craft, and then Magitech or Genesis later on. I lied about Water; a poisoner would take it. There are potential issues here but they only seem worth addressing if we actually have someone who's wanting 3 or more Crafts. And I'd prefer an XP discount on 'repurchases' of Craft; being an awesome swordsmith shouldn't qualify you for weaving. But yeah, let's not even talk about it unless someone encounters specific problems with their character concept. Shifting Committed Essence Since we're doing a campaign in which spending Peripheral Essence would be pretty goddamn bad most of the time, I think we need some way to manage the inherent unbalancing factor of the Night caste anima power. Obviously we don't want to overshadow the power completely, but as it stands it's just too overpowered for this style of campaign. My suggestion would be to allow us to "shift" Committed Essence into Peripheral Essence. The way I thought of having this work would be that one could spend personal essence to power a charm's activation, and then shunt the committed part of the power out to Peripheral Essence. This would effectively double the amount of essence required to power the charm's activation without concealing obvious effects, so it clearly does not overpower the Night caste awesomeness but would allow us limited access to our peripheral pools instead of "lol you committed all your personal, now you cannot do anything". This way, we can activate scene-long charms (and story-long charms during a scene, for that matter) without fucking ourselves over. Instead, we would have spent the motes from our personal essence and then could potentially recharge them through stunting, while still limiting our total available essence if things get crazy and we wind up going all "BLAZING POWER OF THE UNCONQUERED SUN!" Incidentally, it's worth noting that I couldn't find anything to indicate that you can't do something along this line by default. The rules on committed essence are remarkably vague. Possible modification: Make it take a miscellaneous action to shift one's committed essence and/or you can only shift a certain amount of essence per action (amount equal to essence maybe?), if this turns out to be too powerful. Status: Proposed Improved Familiar Background See RPG.Net thread, first post on page 2. Having not read the mutations list I'm not 100% sure this is entirely balanced, but it looks pretty solid to me - at the very least, the central idea of making it so that a 1 dot Familiar is all you need to get the basic Familiar functionality with further purchases improving the familiar seems a perfectly feasible suggestion to me. I'd be pretty keen on starting off with said 1 dot Familiar and having it improve, anyway. I think if we use this rule it would be good to class the Familiar background as a magical background, but otherwise we should classify it as a social background. Status: Proposed Artifacts Glorious Throne of Revision Artifact ●●●●○ This powerful and unique artifact was in its prototype stages when the Usurpation took place, and as such only one exists. The user, who must posess Lore of at least 3 and Linguistics of at least 5, may attune it for 10 motes. The throne must also be installed in a Level 5 Manse. Once attuned, it grants the following functions: (Huge drawbacks! This is to make up for the fact that it is probably significantly campaign-altering) Its most basic function is to act as a receiver and transmitter for Recorders of Everlasting Glories and Million Word Forges (also duplicating the effect of a Million Word Forge). (Obvious one dot power). However, it also grants an additional degree of sophistication to the use of the Recorders of Everlasting Glories. Firstly, although Audient Brushes (and therefore Glorious Recorders) easily identify Natural Mental Influence, the Glorious Throne of Revision also identifies Unnatural Mental Influence effects, highlighted with a glowing colour representing the type of character who used the charm. By spending 5 motes, the user may roll of Perception + Lore at a difficulty of (Charm's Minimum Essence) to identify the charm and its intended purpose . Additionally, the Glorious Throne of Revision can be used to transmit Unnatural Mental Influence. If the owner posesses the charm Letter-Within-a-Letter Technique they may activate it at an additional cost of 1 willpower to retransmit the message, though the person who originally generated the mental influence will know what is happening and will have to re-spend (or maintain commitment of) the motes used for the attack. However, the owner of the Glorious Throne of Revision may use his own Manipulation/Socialize/Linguistics scores for this attack (This is probably 3 dots worth, but it will probably come up very rarely). The owner may also make regular Linguistics attacks through the Glorious Throne, with no penalty for doing so. Finally, the Glorious Throne of Revision may do as its name would suggest and revise the contents of the messages. This allows the owner to edit together newspapers from numerous submitted articles. These newspapers seem remarkably trustworthy, making it ordinarily impossible to identify them as the source of any mental influences contained within and requiring a Perception + Linguistics roll at a difficulty of (owners linguistics) for characters with charms specifically designed to void such an effect, such as Discerning Savant's Eye. Effects allowing enemies to avoid the effects of the mental influence work normally, they simply cannot figure out the source of the mental influence (if anything, more knowledgeable characters would be likely to mis-identify this effect as a dematerialized God using Subtle Whispers). *Leith: this sounds a little like a job for I AM, though that would explain why it had only just been invented at the end of the Age. tbh I think it sounds like a 5-dot artifact, or possibly a 3-dot artifact, while the accompanying modules (especially Million-Word Forge) have their ratings increased. A good concept for your Exalt's artifacts, but needs more work on mechanics, details of charm use through the mass media, stuff like that. Also, not the sort of thing I'd expect us to have just stumbled across. Remebered and reinvented, yes. Quested for, certainly. Perfected Recorder of Glories Artifact ●●●○○ Functions as an Audient Brush (Oadenal's Codex, ), but with additional functionality. For an additional cost of 3 motes the owner of the Recorder may choose, instead of writing what it hears, to transmit the recording back to the Glorious Throne of Revisions. The Recorder has an internal memory capacity of 100 pages, allowing this sending to be delayed somewhat. The brush may also scribe messages that are transmitted from the Glorious Throne of Revisions for a cost of 3 motes. Finally, if motes are not available, the owner may instead spend one willpower to activate any of its functions. Million Word Forge Artifact ●○○○○ This heavy and mostly steel artifact seems inert and thus most examples of this artifact can be found ignored in ruins or scavenged tombs. However, when the user of a Glorious Throne of Revisions chooses, they may send a series of pages to the jade and moonsilver plates for printing. The local controller can decide how many copies are printed, however at least one is always printed. TODO: Assign activation cost? Currently I'm thinking it has to be installed in a Manse or have a Level-1 Hearthstone plugged in to function. There should be no penalty for however many copies of the newspaper one makes, however.